Dezsö Kosztolányi’s “Kornel Esti: A Novel”
New Directions, 2011
Esti is not a classic, Gothic doppelganger, not Jekyll to the narrator s Hyde, but more of a magician who can seem to lift a house by playing a magic flute.
Kornél Esti: A Novel is Hungarian writer Dezsö Kosztolányi’s last work of fiction. Since its publication in 1936, it’s been hailed as a classic, and a wildly popular one at that, so there’s possibly no better way to showcase its many virtues than to plunge headlong into Bernard Adams’s able translation, just out from New Directions. If we are to treat the description by Kosztolányi’s narrator as representative of its flesh-and-blood author’s stance toward his text (text and life offer substantial reasons for doing so), then this book was born of a splendid, poetic, and mad revolution.